I have a fascination with presidential politics and trivia. I can tell you more than you’ve ever wanted to know about Chester A. Arthur at the drop of a jaunty hat, and I can name without checking Wikipedia which president was able to write a letter in Latin in one hand and Greek simultaneously in the other (It’s Garfield, if you have to know). More than the larger-than-life figures, though, I love the weird things that can predict with eerie accuracy who will become president.

But now I wonder if porn isn’t also one of those things. Back in the 2008 race, the world of political parody porn honed in on Sarah Palin, who found herself played by Lisa Ann in a Hustler production called Who’s Nailin’ Paylin? It’s one of those things we can sort of laugh about now, even though it was really, really problematic regarding the treatment of female candidates in presidential politics. However, the important bit to my theory is that Palin, or more accurately the McCain/Palin ticket, lost.

Then came 2012 and an author named Baily Marie put out a short book called Dressage, which was about an erotic tryst between Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan. The short is notable for the line “fuck me like we’ll fuck over the poor,” and for introducing horse imagery into the micro-genre. This will become important in a minute, and I’m sorry. Dressage spawned an entire, since defunct, Tumblr community dedicated to shipping the Republican candidate and his veep pick, and in keeping with the pattern, they lost.

Welcome to 2016, and this year the crop is bigger than ever. On the Democrat side, Bernie Sanders is losing to Hillary Clinton in number of states won, delegates won and total votes won. And he is also the inspiration for Chuck Tingle’s latest porn release,Feeling the Bern in My Butt. I have not read it, but the cover tells me horses are involved. Regardless, between the wank book and the delegate gap, it looks bad for Sanders.

The Republican side isn’t hurting for op-porn-tunities (sorry, not sorry) either. Donald Trump may be the current front-runner in the Republican race, but he is also the star of Elijah Daniel’sThe Billionaire and the Bellboy. The gay bondage romp made it to No. 2 in one of its categories on Amazon, and as someone who writes for a publishing house that contains a gay erotica imprint, I can tell you that’s no small feat. Daniel is musing over making the book into a trilogy.

Then there’s our own Ted Cruz, who I got to describe in an interview recently as “a crazy blobfish no one actually likes.” Thanks to Cruz, presidential porn is going video again. A woman named Searcy Hayes, who went viral after her appearance on the Maury Povich Show because of her incredible likeness to Cruz, has reportedly accepted a $10,000 pornography contract. The offer came from XHamster, who also got into politics in a big way this year by denying service to North Carolina over that state's anti-transgender laws. Congratulations to Cruz for being the first presidential candidate to go Rule 63.

So what about Clinton? I haven’t seen any mainstream porn of the former Secretary of State emerge thus far, and she is by most accounts the person most likely to be sworn into office in January. One thing, though. Clinton was parodied by legendary adult film star Nina Hartley in a threeway lesbian scene that appears near the end of Who’s Nailin’ Paylin. That was 2008, remember? The year she lost to Barack Obama. Obama did eventually end up in the Paylin films, but never in an election cycle.

Admittedly, the data set here is very sporadic and covers a very short time frame, so please take every bit with a big grain of salt, but in the relatively new world of masturbation fantasies focused on presidential candidates, the pattern is pretty hard to miss. If someone out there is making porn of a politician in a big, newsworthy way, that candidate generally doesn’t become president that year.

I don’t have the first clue why, so I reached out to Houston’s favorite sex expert, Emily Snow, for some answers to the question, “why don’t candidates who get made into porn succeed?”

"It's honestly the same reason slut shaming exists," says Snow. "Once someone has been portrayed like that, they're not taken seriously. It's hard to listen to Sarah Palin regardless, but even less after seeing her likeness in a gangbang. I mean, politicians who come out with weird sex allegations usually resign."